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Carcharocles megalodon snacking on Platybelodon in Miocene waters. This image depicts a rare but plausible encounter between the giant shark C. megalodon (jaw diameter estimated at 11 feet) and a medium-sized proboscidean, Platybelodon. Whereas adult sharks likely dined over deep water, relegating their young to the safety of nurseries in shallow lagoons, it is plausible that an adult could enter shallow water occasionally, especially under stress.

The best pictures of the fourth stage of the 2014-15 Volvo Ocean Race, taking in Sanya to Auckland. The race covers 39,379 nautical miles and will visit 11 ports in 11 countries over nine months. Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing took the lead in stage one with Team Brunel taking stage two, stage three was won by Dongfeng Race. Mapfre took the honours on stage four.

Telefonica being knocked down twice during leg 5 of the 2011/12 Volvo Ocean Race.

I’ve talked a bunch about leg 5, how it’s “the” leg in terms of the history of the race. I wanted to explain a little more about why it’s is a big deal to me.

Commerce during the Age of Sail meant sailing around the “Great Capes” that separate the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans and entering the Southern Ocean, the great expanse of water that encircles Antarctica. It’s a region of strong westerlies, frequent storms, and, if one sails far enough south, ice.

And it has waves like nowhere else in the world.

Waves are a function of wind; the stronger the wind the bigger the waves. But there’s another factor: fetch. The greater the distance the wind blows across the water the more time it has to build up bigger waves.

The Southern Ocean basically has infinite fetch. Its waves sweep around the world and just keep going, growing into fast-moving mountains of water. Sailing legend has it that helmsmen in the old days were forbidden to look behind them while surfing those waves, for fear they would become so terrified they would abandon the wheel.

It’s not just the size of Southern Ocean waves that makes them problematic. It’s that they’re so chaotic. As storm systems track eastward the wind changes direction rapidly, creating waves running in opposing directions that collide unpredictably.

That’s what’s happening to Telefonica in the video above. They’re surfing down one wave, when another slams into them from the side. In those conditions it’s easy for a sailor to be washed overboard. And going overboard in the Southern Ocean is almost always a death sentence.

Sailors try to stay clipped in with safety harnesses, but in the rush to take care of the boat and the pressure of competition they sometimes don’t. Even when clipped in, it’s possible to be torn free by a strong enough wave. Three sailors died in the Southern Ocean during the first Whitbread race (the forerunner of the Volvo) in 1973. Since then two more Volvo racers have died, most recently when Hans Horrevoets was washed overboard from ABN Amro Two during a storm in the Atlantic in 2006.

In its early days, the Whitbread/Volvo was about getting down into the Southern Ocean and taking the fastest track around the world, stopping in just a few places: South Africa, Australia/New Zealand, and South America. These days the course takes them north to stopovers in host cities situated in more benign latitudes. But leg 5, the longest leg, still takes them down into the Southern Ocean and keeps them there for thousands of miles, exposed to its winds and waves as they travel to and around the most feared and revered of the Great Capes: Cape Horn.

Sailing into the Southern Ocean in any boat is a significant act. Doing it in a 65-foot planing dinghy is an act that defies human limitations.

In “What is an animal?,” most of the invertebrates are represented by hand-made glass models. LIKE WHOA

In the often quiet and contemplative hall “Plants of the World,” I like to have my mind blown twofold by realizing everything in there was meticulously hand-made with wax and molds and paint – and also I had no idea peanuts grew that way, legumes amirite?

Find a quiet area in one of the mammal halls and stand in front of a diorama for at least 15 minutes pondering the beauty and fragility of our collective existence

Two of our lichenologists paid $20 for this rusty car door in Puerto Rico – it has more than fifty-four unique species of lichens on it, many of which are bioluminescent (it’s in “Lichens: The Coolest Things You’ve Never Heard Of”)

there’s a cow hidden in the Silurian Reef

I like to stick around and see the light turn on behind the setting sun around closing time in the Walrus diorama, ground floor.

Although brightly colored, the sky-blue Cerulean Warbler is not easy to spot: It nests high in the forest canopy, where it can often be detected only by its rapid, buzzy song.

Unfortunately, the Cerulean Warbler has become even harder to find. Its population has declined by about 70 percent in the past 40 years, making it one of North America’s most threatened migrant songbirds. The greatest threats are habitat destruction and fragmentation on both breeding and wintering grounds due to logging, mountaintop mining, and agricultural development.

Other threats to Cerulean Warblers include nest parasites such as Brown-headed Cowbirds. These and other predators easily invade fragmented forests and can lower the warbler’s breeding success.

Reversing the species’ rapid decline is one of ABC’s top priorities. In North America, ABC works with the Central Hardwoods and Appalachian Mountain Joint Ventures (AMJV) to protect important breeding habitat for Cerulean Warblers. The latter recently received an $8 million grant through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Regional Conservation Partnership Program to restore even more habitat, working with more than a dozen partners. The AMJV-led project will enhance 12,500 acres of forest habitat on private lands for Cerulean Warblers and other wildlife. Approximately 1,000 acres of reclaimed mine lands will also be restored.

ABC and partners also used studies on forest management techniques for the warblers to create a Best Management Practices document for land managers and landowners. With these techniques, we are figuring out how to get more Cerulean Warblers to use an acre of forest by thinning certain trees, allowing other trees to grow larger and providing the more complex canopy structures needed by these birds.

On the species’ South American wintering grounds, ABC and Colombian partner Fundación ProAves initiated the Cerulean Warbler Conservation Corridor in 2008, working to enhance habitat quality by planting trees on private lands between the Pauxi Pauxi and Cerulean Warbler Reserves managed by ProAves. This work benefits other migratory birds such as Canada and Golden-winged Warblers, and threatened birds found nowhere else, including Gorgeted Wood-Quail and White-mantled Barbet. The partners have also produced a Cerulean Warbler Conservation Plan in English and Spanish.

Recent expansion of Ecuador’s Narupa Reserve has preserved even more valuable wintering habitat for the Cerulean Warbler and many other migrants like Olive-sided Flycatcher. ABC is currently supporting monitoring work for Cerulean and other warblers in northern Peru and Ecuador as well.

‘This… stuff’? Oh. Okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select… I don’t know… that lumpy blue sweater, for instance because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean…

I had Miranda’s whole speech here, queued up for a friggin’ month, I swear, and then that dress meme post that used it comes along and steals my thunder. Grr…

I’ve been there a couple times. I think there are 4 tours; reserve ahead. I like the antique kitchens! Keep your eyes open for zebras grazing wild around there next time you’re in the area: WRH had a private zoo and they set the herbivores free.

I’m now picturing giraffes running past the B&Bs on Moonstone Beach, like in that shot in Twelve Monkeys.

Hey all! We pumped out the first video of our series “Nature Boom Time” and it’s pretty fun. We’re still working out some kinks in the equipment and storytelling methods but we’re pretty jacked up about this first draft. Take a look, share it around, and let me know what you think! Thanks a bunch!

I’ve seen it from the coast many times when visiting Cambria and making a jaunt north to see the elephant seals, or when en route to Kirk Creek Campground. My wife always suggests a side trip to it (she’s been at least a few times in the pre-me era), but for some reason we’ve never followed through on doing it. Next time!

When I was a teenager we sailed my dad’s boat north up the coast to San Francisco to participate in a race, and we spent a night anchored in the cove at San Simeon. I rowed over to that wooded peninsula on the west side of the cove and hiked around in it. It was really cool; it felt like no one had been there for years. I imagined I was back in WRH’s day, when they were using the cove to bring in all those amazing works of art for the castle.

This Picture of the Week shows Arp 230, also known as IC 51, observed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.Arp 230 is a galaxy of an uncommon or peculiar shape, and is therefore part of the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies produced by Halton Arp. Its irregular shape is thought to be the result of a violent collision with another galaxy sometime in the past. The collision could also be held responsible for the formation of the galaxy’s polar ring.The outer ring surrounding the galaxy consists of gas and stars and rotates over the poles of the galaxy. It is thought that the orbit of the smaller of the two galaxies that created Arp 230 was perpendicular to the disk of the second, larger galaxy when they collided. In the process of merging the smaller galaxy would have been ripped apart and may have formed the polar ring structure astronomers can observe today.Arp 230 is quite small for a lenticular galaxy, so the two original galaxies forming it must both have been smaller than the Milky Way. A lenticular galaxy is a galaxy with a prominent central bulge and a disk, but no clear spiral arms. They are classified as intermediate between an elliptical galaxy and a spiral galaxy.Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Flickr user Det58

Happy Birthday Jane

So while we’re in the throws of production for All’s Fair Play, and up to our
eyeballs in work, I still had to take a second to say it:

Happy Birthday
Jane :)

It’s been a crazy 8 months- and we’ve run so
quickly into producing the next series that while I miss everything
about that character and that show, I don’t always have the time to
dwell on it properly. But from time to time I’ll see another gif set or
run into a text post in the AoJE tag- with a very quiet “we miss you”,
sometimes just hidden in the tags of a post, and my heart just swells.

Jane
and her story were such a big part of my life and the lives of so many
people for almost 2 years, that it’s weird sometimes to be living
without her. But in a way she became so embedded in every aspect of what
I do, and so much of what I learned in those 2 years that for me at
least, she’s always hanging around.

So today,
and hopefully yesterday, (as Jane’s B-day is actually on Feb 29th) we
raise our glass to you girl and to everyone who cared about your story.

I know you’re happy and loved, so Thank You for giving us so much of the same.

- Nessa

Yes, so much yes! Happy birthday to Jane! And these are some lovely photos.

The first opaque, pure, affordable, mauve-colored pigment, manganese violet was a favorite of Claude Monet’s. He once said, “I have finally discovered the true color of the atmosphere. It’s violet. Fresh air is violet.”